News on Google Supplemental Results

Like you, I was i was used to seeing my pages getting indexed rather quickly at Google and would never be bothered by the supplemental results problem.

In order to avoid supplementals you must avoid:

Duplicate content

Identical title and description meta tags

Reduced amount of indexable content

Too much of a complex URL

Bad internal linking

Pages once with incoming links which then lost them but continue to remain indexed

Now let me tell you what I witnessed over the past month with a website of a Client. They operate in a rather competitive industry.

We created some new and original content – a small set of 3 pages, placed in a new folder: They went online over a 10 day period.

Spidering on this particular website is not very frequent – I believe this is due to the fact that most of the content is not changing very frequently. All pages were identified via internal linking and indexed BUT … they were immediately placed in the supplemental results index by Big G.

There was no reason in the world for them to be there, so I thought it would be best to just sit and wait to see what happened. It was a gut feeling.

It took just about 1 month for something to change – the pages came out of the supplementals without my doing anything in particular. They are not achieving excellent rankings as you would expect – they are new with just a few internal links pointing to them – but they are ranking.

It looks like these new pages were automatically added to the supplemental results by default. They were then reviewed and found fit to be promoted into the main index. Something I had never witnessed before.

Is it a sort of sand box for new pages ?

Is it a new way to validate content prior to publishing it, a sort of preemptive spam filtering method ?